Gruul (Blackrock Foundry) Strategy Guide

Gruul Strategy GuideGruulGruul can be found in Gruul's Lair, in the Slagworks wing of the Fonderie des Rochenoires raid. Players may choose to defeat Mangeroc or Gruul first in the wing, but both must be defeated to gain access to the third Slagworks boss, the Blast Furnace.

This Fonderie des Rochenoires raid strategy guide provides an overview of killing Gruul for raid leaders as well as specific tips for tanks, healers, and dps. It also includes information on harmful trash, and screenshots of harmful abilities.

This guide provides an in-depth look at Normal and Heroic difficulties, with summaries of changes in Mythic and Looking for Raid difficulties.

Notable Trash Mobs

Since Gruul can be accessed as the first boss of a wing, players must pass through the trash in the Workshop to get to him. This trash is shared by the first bosses of each wing, and consists of the following enemy types:

Tanks should pull carefully in this room as the AoE damage is very heavy while either an Ogron Hauler or the Iron Slag-Shapers are alive. Try to avoid pulling other packs with the Hauler, and to pull small packs of the remaining enemies. Use crowd-control abilities to reduce the extreme AoE damage of the Flamebinder/Slag-Shaper/Guardian packs.

Chain Volley deals heavy AoE damageThe final pack of trash before Gruul is very dangerous and will require extensive AoE healing and crowd control. This pack includes two Travailleur gronnlins, four Compagnon de Fer adds, and a mini-boss named Karnor le Cruel.

Iron Journeyman deals heavy melee damage to the tank, but no raid/AoE damage, and is fairly inconsequential.

Gruul Tips & Strategy

PetrifiedGruul is a simple and straightforward single-target encounter, and is a reprise of an encounter in Repaire de Gruul from The Burning Crusade expansion, including the same core mechanic of Pétrifier/Fracasser.

About 30 seconds into the fight, and approximately every minute thereafter, Gruul will cast Heurt pétrifiant, which will choose a handful of random players in the raid (5 in 10-player raids, scaling up to 10 in a 30-player raid).

The chosen players are knocked back and will gain Pétrifier, which accumulates one stack per second.

Each stack reduces players' movement speed by 20%, and at 5 stacks, players gain Pétrifié, and are immobilized and incapacitated.

Gruul will Fracasser the Pétrifié players, dealing heavy damage to these players and anyone within 8 yards of them.

Players must quickly react to Pétrifier, and move away from the raid and away from each other.

Personal damage reduction cooldowns can be used before players are fully Pétrifié, to assist in mitigating Fracasser damage.

Inferno Slice must be split amongst several raid membersAnother central mechanic of the new Gruul encounter is Tranchoir de la fournaise. When Gruul reaches 100 Rage, he will attack a tank with this ability, dealing an extremely large amount of damage that is split evenly between all players in front of Gruul, and debuffing all affected players with a moderate DoT.

The tank must point Gruul at a pile of players to share the damage and survive.

Players must react quickly to dodge the Smash, as Smash and Slice damage in rapid succession can be fatal, but the group should dodge in the same direction to ensure Tranchoir de la fournaise is split.

Step out of Cave In zonesAbout two minutes into the fight, and approximately every two minutes thereafter, Gruul will enter a Saccage destructeur, becoming untankable and casting four back-to-back Frappe écrasantees. Players must try to avoid damage from these, as this should be a low-damage period to allow healers to catch up on tank and raid healing.

Gruul also attacks the tanks with Coups accablants, which deals heavy damage to all players within 10 yards and leaves them more vulnerable to further Coups accablants damage. Tanks must make sure that this attack does not happen while Gruul is faced into the raid for Tranchoir de la fournaise; by taunting quickly or rapidly moving to drag Gruul away from the raid as soon as Tranchoir de la fournaise occurs.

Finally, Gruul will frequently cause Éboulement near random players in the room, causing a small zone of lingering AoE damage. Players must move out of the Éboulement without jeopardizing their ability to soak Tranchoir de la fournaise.

Looking For Raid Difficulty

On Looking For Raid difficulty, the Coups accablants mechanic does not exist. The only debuff the tanks must manage is Inferno Strike; trading the boss after 3 stacks will keep tank damage fairly low.

The rest of the raid can stack in a single group for Tranchoir de la fournaise, since the attack and subsequent DoT do vastly reduced damage. The stacks will reset during each Saccage destructeur, so healing will remain manageable.

Fracasser deals a much smaller amount of damage in this difficulty. While affected players should still spread out, it is unlikely to wipe the raid if a handful of players fail to do so.Return to Table of Contents

If using the two-group strategy, raid CDs should be used whenever a group is about to take its second Tranchoir de la fournaise. In the three-group strategy, raid CDs should be planned around Pétrifier.

There are several furnaces on the perimeter of Gruul's encounter area, and periodically these furnaces will spit out small fireballs that travel in a straight line until reaching the opposite side of the room. If the Flamboiement passes through or near a player, it will deal that player damage and leave a debuff that will cause the player to take 20% additional fire damage.

In addition to Flamboiement, Mythic Gruul will affect every player with Pétrifier, rather than affecting only a small subset of the raid. Players must coordinate to spread out quickly, possibly even pre-determining a spread pattern to eliminate mistakes, and movement speed boosts like Ruée rugissante will assist in spreading quickly.

For more information on defeating Mythic Gruul, check out Method's Mythic Gruul Guide, including video and class-specific tips and tricks provided by Method players! Note that their guide was produced in the time before Patch 6.1, which reverted Tranchoir de la fournaise to a 30-second debuff; while their strategy will certainly still work, it is no longer necessary with the shorter-duration debuff.

Commentaires

Commentaire de Dreins

So, they decided to change Cave In? I really liked the version on videos from beta, the new (actually, as old as BC) is just boring.

Commentaire de Dayani

Just one thing I want to add, but that I'm not sure is a solid enough strategy for most groups to use, so I'm reluctant to put it directly into the guide:

You can use tanks to solo-soak Inferno Slice, at least on Normal difficulty. The tank will need a powerful cooldown, since the total Inferno Slice deals upwards of 1,000,000 damage, and it may be simpler to use three tanks with this strategy, so that each tank takes one Slice every 45-ish seconds and hopefully will have powerful cooldowns available more often. Healers will probably need to provide whatever external CDs they can, especially if the tank doesn't have a major CD available for their soak.

This strategy has the advantage of allowing melee DPS to remain behind the boss, and eliminating the vast majority of raid damage. All that is left is Petrify/Shatter, which is light damage when handled correctly, and the wholly avoidable damage of Cave In and Overhead Smash.

The disadvantage is that if tanks mess up their cooldown timing or taunt timing and soak two in a row, they'll die, and once one tank dies, the other tank is likely to die unless players are very quick with a combat resurrection.

But, this is in fact possible, and I'm sure people will want to try it on more difficulties, so while I don't recommend it, I should at least acknowledge it. I'll be interested to hear from more raids who try this strategy and what their experience was like! :)

Note: this is untenable on Mythic difficulty, as there is an anti-solo-soak mechanic that causes Gruul to use Inferno Slice more frequently if fewer than 4 people soak it.

Commentaire de sorenjohnk

Very, very nice guide. Looking forward to do this fight in February!

Commentaire de Somavian

Does anyone know if spell immunity cooldowns like Cloak of Shadows block Inferno Slice? If so, would the blocked damage be eliminated entirely or simply split between the rest of the group as if there were one less person?

Commentaire de Wirxaw

Ok, I want to try to solo-soak this slice on my DK, although I don't have appropriate stamina trinkets...

~500k hp+Bone Shield+Rune Tap+Defile+AMS... perhaps Absorb glyphed AMS...Granted that AMS is 250k spell hp, the total health for spell component I'll have is ~750k, 1mil with Absorb glyph.BS+RT+Defile is approximately 70% effective damage reduction, unless BS+RT stack multiplicatively or have DR, while Defile is separate 10% absorb.Slice deals, at least according to default tooltip - 450k physical and 800k spell damage.Physical damage will be reduced by ~50% through armor, and along with total damage reductions from stances\passives, let's round it down to 200k physical damage +700k spell damage.70% reduction will make 200k into something like 75k, while 700k will be ~300k spell damage.This will leave me taking only 50k spell damage without Absorb glyph, and 75k physical damage. Should be fun. Pointless, yes, but fun.

Commentaire de Pelontir

Great guide as always! :-)

One thing is missing in the loot table I think: the 1 handed strength weapon that drops on normal difficulty and higher.

Commentaire de Zeraveth

More awesome guides from Dayani! As always, easy on the eyes and doesn't involve a lot of unnecessary stuff.

Killed this guy on heroic last night with my guild, we wiped for like an hour because our tanks couldn't move quickly enough to get the slice to hit the soak group, or they moved too quick and the soak group was hit by Overwhelming Blows. So for those who are struggling with the same thing, we did this: Have your off tank stand in the group taking the next Inferno slice, just as Gruul starts to channel the ability, the off tank taunts him and he will instantly turn to the group, making sure he hits them with Inferno Slice. Then your main tank taunts back to avoid Overwehlming Blows in the soak group, rinse and repeat.

Commentaire de SloppyBeaver

Commentaire de MinuteVid

Commentaire de Stoneybeard

One Tactic that we tried on HC Gruul was to have a the raid split on either side of him as normal, one tank in front of him for the smashes, and the OT in one of the groups.What we did was to have the OT taunt the infernal strike whilst in the group and MT taunt back.The OT would then move to the other group and repeat, but on the 3rd Infernal Strike the MT wouldn't taunt back and they would swop positions.

We got him down on the 2nd attempt using this tactic so i hope this helps.

Commentaire de Dayani

Just a note for groups trying Mythic Gruul:

Prior to Patch 6.1, the debuff gained from Inferno Slice on Mythic difficulty would last 40-42 seconds, which made a 2-group, 2-stack strategy untenable - the debuff would never fall off. That's why early guides (including this one) recommend a 2-group, 3-stack strategy, or a 3-group, 2-stack strategy, or had complicated setups where four players with powerful survivability cooldowns would soak some Slices and clear the debuffs with immunities.

In Patch 6.1, a hotfix was applied to revert the Inferno Slice debuff duration to 30 seconds, the way it is on LFR/Normal/Heroic difficulties. This makes the fight much simpler for healing and group organisation. A simple 1-1-1 strategy produces the lowest raid damage overall, while a 2-2 strategy preserves the simplicity of a group's already familiar Heroic tactic.

I've updated the guide to reflect the change. I suspect Inferno Slice will stay at a 30-second duration for the remainder of the raid's relevancy. Remember that guides not updated since 6.1 may be providing advice for a harder version of the encounter than what players will now experience!

Commentaire de lecanard2

more rehashed content, qq

does this mean old gruul in current outland is unplayable? how confusing

also this means that gruul in the past was stronger than he is now. god this lore has become so bad

Commentaire de Swemage

Commentaire de wired2thebrink

Seems to be a tanking bug or problem :few people have mentioned on us and eu forums that they stand with the group tanking but take a full hit from inferno stirke > Like say 600k plus.

It would seem if you stand too close to Gruul while tanking and soaking slice you can get hit in the back. thus making a crit hit ( yes i know crit hits dont show on logs but it still is double the amount you should take)

My advice if to stand far enough away so you not touching his inner red circle. If you look at Gruul hes leaning over so if you too close hes leaning over you.I personally think its a bug or flaw and blizzard need to fix it

Commentaire de mikedarling905

One thing I noticed on LFR is that, EVERYONE is so spread out. For a great success I wish people moved in 2 piles of groups. Just makes it easier for the tanks :) Lets think of the tanks!

Commentaire de whyzzim

It is possible to do Mythic with 4 tanks while solo-soaking every Inferno Slice. The good thing is that due to the anti-solo-soaking mechanic, there will be 12 Inferno Slices in one p1, but Gruul will not use any of his other p1 abilities because he is too busy on Tranchoir de la fournaise, so the rest of the group won't get much damage and you can have just 3-4 healers. The only damage non-tanks face will be those flares, which are easy to dodge and not fatal. During the Rampage phase you may need to use group healing cds.